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So I play a bit of Hearthstone. Not a ton. All my cards come from in-game winnings; I haven’t dropped RealCash™ on any decks. Hell, I barely know how to build a deck myself. The depth of my strategy is to make sure every class has some Taunt cards and try and put a shit ton of Beast minions in my Hunter’s deck. I’ve been ranked, like, at a one-star Argent Squire on the ladder. For the past five months. I am the definition of a casual player.

So when Blizzard announced the Naxxramas expansion/campaign/comedy improv hour/whatever — I figured it would be focused more for the hard-core deck-addict investment players. You know, people who actually know what a “nine mana Warlock board clear combo potential” means. Or if such a thing even exists. “It’s Blizzard,” I thought, “They roll out huge raids in WoW patches for the end-game guilds and then give the rest of us, like, five new cooking recipies and another holiday event questline.”

(For anyone who’s interested, my WoW guild has an active membership of about nine characters. All of them are my alts.)

But I checked out the Naxx Adventure and I managed to beat the first three bosses using my economy Hunter deck. Anub’Rekhan went belly-up on my first try, which was gratifying, netting me my first two new cards. Grand Widow Faerlina and Maexxna were significantly harder, but after three or four tries I managed to pummel them into the pavement. So for the investment of an hour or two I netted seven cards, including the Legendary Maexxna one, which is a Beast type.

Acceptance arrived quickly despite the soul-crushing blow dealt to my spirit today. I refer, of course, to the weekend beta code. Apparently the fine print was not read closely by yours truly, for upon the advent of the Auspicious Announcement, it turned out my NCSOFT login no longer allowed me to enter my WildStar account.

What fresh hell is this? WITCHCRAFT, I tell you!

But fear not, dear reader, for I have consolation in spades. Well, maybe not spades, but in quantity enough to spare a bit for all. For there is yet more from LAST weekend I have not shared, and I shall do now here and now! Avaunt, ye melancholic humours!

Sorry. Lost myself a bit there. Back to it.

Tradeskills —

There’s tons of goodvideo on W* tradeskills available. I horsed around with Technologist/Relic Hunter and could make some excellent medishots and buffs right away. Go Juice is awesome, by the way. Cheap to make, great for shortening travel time or escaping fights, and stacks vendor for upward of a gold, which will be very helpful come level 14 when you want to afford your house. Resources were extremely plentiful at least at the lower levels (and they should be: low-level unlocks should never have prohibitive usability barriers) and the crafting station became a go-to stop every time I returned to town. The variance system was a blast, although a bit painful to the checkbook.

(For those that don’t know, recipes frequently have variations that are created by paying game-cash to slot in other ingredients. Your one-hit medishot might be able to do its healing over time, or do a series of weaker heals and then one big blast at the end, for instance. It’s gonna cost ya, tho.)

An artificial economy needs sinks to balance currency value, however, and this could be a very effective method.

Lag —

I’ll admit my system isn’t cutting edge. Honestly, I’ve no idea what the average PC gamer’s rig looks like these days, but I’m probably on the low end if anything. I was not expecting flawless framerate with cranked graphics. Besides, it’s beta, for fuck’s sake. Things are going to be glitchy and psycho at times.

But good-god-almighty; people could not accept it. Every time I logged in I bailed out of the Advice channel ASAP just to ditch the tirades. Now, if you’ve got a crazy-ass system that usually eats benchmark software packages for lunch and spits out their skeletonized code fragments, sub-standard performance may not be a common experience for you. Understand one thing, however:

It does not mean a game is crap.

Yes, there were areas that I could barely operate in because my Mordesh was taking a single step every five seconds and then suddenly outrunning his own bullets, or firing assaults into phantom monsters that were not where they appeared to be. And I will ragequit for a good half-hour if I have to try and ride a waterspout up a cliff under severe lag problems again.

But I was still having fun. So suck it, lag — you can’t ruin MY day. Besides, server announcements proved that Carbine was well aware of the state of play and actively working to combat the problems. What more do you Advice channel douchenozzles want?

((Rant disclaimer — the majority of players seemed to be lovely folks who were overjoyed at seeing Nexus firsthand. My ire is directed only at the vocal turdmuffins who monopolized much of the chatbox space.))

Environment —

Love love love the interactive environment. Jumpy-platform ‘shrooms are beautiful things. And the achievement system. Wait, you get LOOT for achievements? Take my non-existent money! Hang on, if I use my scanbot to examine this totem I get a temporary flight form? Ye gods! And just across the river…

It’s fresh. After several years of MMOs that seem to rehash the same mechanics, WildStar is the only one that seems to be willing to raise the bar. The game doesn’t treat you like a novice. The designers know they have a number of new systems and mechanics, and the game seems aware that much of the sequences of combat and exploration will be new to the players. They’ve put the effort into teaching new players how to work the systems and the environment, and while I was by no means an expert, I felt reasonably proficient fairly quickly.

If you’ve read anything about WildStar, you probably know about the highly mobile combat and the telegraph system. As I am more used to the stand-and-fire elements of World of Warcraft combat, I felt like the stereotypical redcoat faced with Native American hit-and-run warfare. ((Note: I am well aware of the historical inaccuracy of this metaphor.))

It’s at this point that one becomes fast friends with the Dash button.

Eventually you find your rhythm and begin to dodge most of the enemy telegraphs, and despite fights being a bit on the longer side, you have more health at the end of combat. Adds make life exponentially more complicated, but honestly, the frenetic pace is very enjoyable.

I’m a huge fan of the housing system as well — it unlocks at level 14, so I only got to play around with it briefly. Which brings me to my very first photo-journal!

Well, lasses and lads, it’s been almost a full year since my little game-blogging experiment went on hiatus. Life is a many-splendored thing (or are those the wrong lyrics?) and I’ve got my writing chops back. Besides, I just got in on the mother-effing WildStar beta, near as I can tell. So that’s hellaciously awesome.

Sad bit is, I don’t think I can play until after work tomorrow, assuming my semi-outdated system can even run the game. Fingers crossed.

So I’m going to tip my hand for you folks a bit and let you in on one of my favorite parts of game prep: Character Planning! Hopefully the names I want are available.

My first character is to be Christoph Croake, a Mordesh Spellslinger of dubious pedigree. I love the futuristic Victorian elements that Carbine’s applied to these Grismaran natives, and the tropes of Guns Akimbo and Omnidisciplinary Scientist blend together nicely. Since his planet was decimated by alchemy gone awry, a potentially-limiting class-based society has gone the way of the dodo (or whatever harmless alien bird species have been extinct-ified in a similar fashion), giving Christoph a fair option at making himself more than a working stiff. That’s a bit of a pun, for those who know their Mordesh lore.

I’m breaking out the ol’ scattergun to try and hit as many interesting bits and items that I can. There’s a slew of cool crap coming down the pipeline, and I might not be the first on board, but I’m certainly going to try to make up for lost time.

Albion Online looks ambitious enough. I like the concept of a far-reaching cross-platformer, and as you can all probably tell, RPGs are where I cut my teeth and do the most of my playtime. One thing that rocks a good RPG for me (at least in a mechanical sense) is variety, variety, variety – I don’t want my character to simply be another Variation on a Theme of xx_PaGaNiNiskullz_xx (that’s a Brahms joke for you non-musical types). And of course, the fact that I can steal crap from other people that they paid for gives my inner brigand a very real jolt of excitement.

I haven’t mentioned Watch Dogs yet, which is almost a crime, because it looks like a godforsaken amazing ride. I’m always a sucker for new mechanics, and the linking of hacking to combat to investigation to manipulation to plain awesome looks incredible. The atmosphere seems polished and if the gameplay is as customizable as the videos seem to indicate, I think we’ve got at excellent debut on our hands. Absolutely keep an eye on this one.

WildStar did another Uplink, this one on PvP, a topic that brings on a mouthfoaming debate whenever multiplayer games exist. So that’s fun. My take is that if any aspect of your MMO is a grind, you’ve lost the better part of your audience. Now, I’ve never done much PvP myself in RPGs, being that I’m a story junkie and a laid-back explorer type, but I’m always willing to risk another beatdown at the hands of my rabid diehard peers if it looks fun — so if WildStar tries to do as many innovative things with their PvP that they seem hellbent on doing everywhere else on Nexus, I’m planning to give it a go. Viva la curbstomp.

Also, Anita Sarkeesian has debuted her Tropes vs Women series. It’s a bit long, and her first episode isn’t earthshatteringly insightful right off the bat, but she’s beginning to establish her foundation. You might not be blown away by the introductory episode, but this bears watching. So go be objective about the entertainment field that we love so much and give the lady a hearing.

We’re also approaching Defiance. Post-apocalyptic, aliens, crazy weapons, superhuman powers, and a TV show to go along with it. It’s like the antithetical Captain Planet. Or something similar.

Last but not least, Shroud of the Avatar. I’m sure it’s a huge injury to my gamer cred that I’ve never played an Ultima game of any stripe, but even I know who Richard Garriott is. Considering that the man cut his teeth in game development for homebrew D&D, it gives me hope that I might have a future in the industry too. No, you did NOT just hear the sound of me kicking my 3.5ed books under the table. Anyway.

Like everything else in this entry, we’ve got a highly ambitious project, and the fact that it’s starting as a crowdsourced/funded endeavor gives me some jitters. Once again, story-centric games make me drool and despite the unpolished look of the graphics, I want to see where this one goes. I want to see it very much.

You know the jealous feeling you get when you see a photo montage from some Facebook acquaintance who has wantonly splattered images of their latest trip to the Bahamas? I haveno ideawhatthat’slike.

Regardless, it sounds like Team WildStar rolled out an NDA-laced red carpet for their attendees. In their public rundown, there are hints of upcoming videos for later this month, rumors of funny costumes, and a place called Deradune. Of course, beta signups are still open, so get out there and ENLIST, gorramit.

Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll be the one giving you the rundown from an Arkship event.